The fate of the first Christendom

One of the more significant books to come out last year was Philip Jenkins’ The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). Jenkins’ prediction of a dynamic christian future in Africa and Asia is impressive enough, but I was particularly intrigued by his history, especially the tragic fate of what might be called the “first Christendom” in the old eastern Roman world. Here is Jenkins himself:

As late as the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Christians still made up a large proportion of most former Roman territories that had fallen under Muslim rule, in societies like Syria, Mesopotamia, and Egypt, and it is not easy to tell when Muslims actually gained majority status in these communities. A reasonable guess would place the transition around the time of the Crusades, about 1100 or 1200 (p. 22).

The size of the Christian communities in the East is significant because in the Middle Ages, the Eastern lands were more densely populated than those of Europe. Medieval England and France were Christian states, while the regimes of Egypt and Syria were solidly Muslim, but there may have been more Christians all told in the Eastern states than the Western.... In the thirteenth century, the height of medieval Christian civilization in Europe, there may have been more Christian believers on the continent of Asia than in Europe, while Africa still had populous Christian communities... (p. 23).

On balance, I would argue that at the time of the Magna Carta or the Crusades, if we imagine a typical Christian, we should still be thinking not of a French artisan, but of a Syrian peasant or Mesopotamian towndweller, an Asian not a European (p. 24).

I have recently read Bat Ye’or’s The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam: From Jihad to Dhimmitude (Cranbury, New Jersey: Associated University Presses, 1996), whose interpretation of history is similar to Jenkins’. She goes to great lengths to demonstrate that for nearly fourteen centuries the huge numbers of Christians and Jews in the Middle East and north Africa were subjected by their conquerors to systematic pressure to convert to the conquering religion. The first generations held out, but eventually such policies had their inevitable effect, leading to the long term decline of the first Christendom and its replacement by muslim majorities within the dar al-Islam, i.e., the territory under muslim rule.

In one of my classes this past year I had a student who is an Assyrian Christian born in Iraq. The numbers of such Christians are uncertain, but estimates range from 1 to 2.5 million in Iraq, with two to four times that many living in an Assyrian diaspora in Europe, North America and Australia. Their native language is Aramaic or Syriac, once the lingua franca of the old fertile crescent.

Middle Eastern Christians tend not to receive a very good press in the west, despite their status as the aboriginal inhabitants of the region. But I myself have come to have a great deal of admiration for them. After all, these are believers who have held firm against formidable odds for more than fifty generations, when most of their co-religionists did not. In the latter half of the twentieth century, by contrast, western churches emptied within a very few years, and for less significant reasons.

The Copts, the Maronites, the Assyrians, and others are the first Christendom. The west is the second Christendom. The next Christendom, if Jenkins is correct, will be centred in Africa, but also in Korea and China. Yet I wonder whether, in the providence of God, there might not be a significant future role to be played by the descendants of the original Syriac-speaking followers of Jesus Christ – if not in the Middle East, then perhaps in the diaspora.